Tuesday, November 27, 2012

The Genomics of Art, Education & Commerce: Part I

Recently I blogged about Art.sy, a service built on “The Art Genome Project”
that enables users to discover, learn about, and collect art that is suggested
to them via a mathematical algorithm. That post provoked so much interesting
discussion that I followed up with Christine Kuan, Chief Curator and Director
of Strategic Partnerships at Art.sy, to relay some of the questions raised by
commentators related to Art.sy’s educational goals, its for-profit business
model, and its relationship to the art world. This is the first of two posts
sharing her replies.

Q: What’s your background—how did you end up working for Art.sy on this
project?

CK: I majored in art history and English literature and
then taught for a year at Beijing University. My first job, after getting my
MFA in Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was administering The Andrew W.
Foundation Mellon Chinese Museum Directors Program at The Metropolitan Museum
of Art. Philippe de Montebello was Director then. I was deeply influenced by
his philosophy of curatorial excellence and public mission. After that I was
the editor of Grove Art Online at Oxford University Press, and then Chief
Curatorial Officer & Vice President for External Affairs at ARTstor. In all of these roles, it was about building encyclopedic coverage of
world art and cultivating relationships with people and institutions so that
could happen.

John
Elderfield, Art.sy’s Senior Advisor and Chief Curator Emeritus of MOMA,
approached me earlier this year about Art.sy’s educational and scholarly ambitions.
I became extremely interested in both the challenges of the project and the
potential positive impact Art.sy could have on the art world and on public
engagement with art. The truth is, art isn’t as accessible to general audiences
as people might think, particularly for low income and minority demographics
and for people who don’t live in major cities. Art.sy, with its engineering,
interaction design, and The Art Genome Project, is rethinking the way we
provide online access to art.

For example,
we have a gene for “Nude” which allows you to easily go from the Venus of
Willendorf, 24000 to 22000 BCE to Peter Paul Rubens: Psyche, c.1612-15 to contemporary
photographs of Kate Moss by Mario Sorrenti. This is significant not only for
art historians, but for a number of areas of study—Feminist Theory, Popular
Culture, Renaissance Studies, etc. Millions of images are already available at
high-quality on the Web, but providing pathways and connections across 25,000+
artworks from all time periods and cultures in a way that everyone can utilize,
not just experts in-the-know, is what’s really special about Art.sy.

Q:Your title at
Art.sy includes “Chief Curator”—how is what you do similar to what a museum
curator does, and how is it different?

CK: It’s similar in the sense that I’m responsible for
the overarching strategy for assembling the collections for Art.sy and working
with museums, foundations, artists’ estates, and individuals to cultivate those
partnerships and relationships that will make our collections encyclopedic and
compelling. We’re also going to be working on a number of online exhibitions in
collaboration with various organizations, including Electronic Arts Intermix
(EAI), which is one of the largest archives of video art. While curators at
museums are curating collections of physical objects and dealing with those
issues around education, conservation, exhibitions, and public relations, I’m
overseeing those same issues around digital assets—education, digital
preservation, intellectual property, virtual exhibitions, and communicating our
mission to our partners, potential partners, and the public. I’m always thinking
about how we can represent a broader range of artists, geographical regions,
different cultures and time periods and how we create a meaningful experience
and service both for our users and for our partners.

Q. Art.sy has both a profit motive and an educational mission. You’ve
worked at both nonprofit and for-profit ventures—do you feel that being a
for-profit affects the educational dynamic, and if so, how?

CK: Generating revenue is pretty much essential to every
museum, nonprofit, and for-profit company these days. Even traditionally
government-supported European museums have found their funding drastically cut
in recent years and are searching for new ways to generate revenue. Whether
it’s Target-sponsored free Friday nights at the museum or the Internet, we know
that providing free access is the best way to pull in the largest number of
visitors and to make the greatest impact.

Art.sy is building
a robust, networked platform that is trying to anticipate where discovery,
learning, and the art world will be 5-10 years from now. Today, 80% of art
history students study contemporary art, and that the bulk of that art is being
shown in galleries. Being for-profit, in the sense of taking a sales commission
from artworks that sell through our website, is a sustainability plan that
makes sense in the online realm and it enables us to be free to the public. I
think the boundaries we draw in the analog realm really dissolve online—if you
do a web search for any artist right now, you get works from commercial and
non-commercial sources, and maybe also t-shirts, coffee cups, ads, birthday
parties, and vacation photos. The difference is that Art.sy is a curated platform
that provides free, public access to art from more than 300+ galleries and more
than 70+ nonprofit partners, including SFMOMA, The British Museum, Smithsonian
Cooper-Hewitt: National Design Museum, Fondation Beyeler, Corcoran Gallery of
Art, Diebenkorn Foundation, Canadian Museum of Inuit Art, Asian Art Museum,
Dallas Art Museum, Calder Foundation, Walters Art Museum, The Royal Collection,
Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Estate of David Smith, and others.